Drinking an average of five sodas a week doesn’t sound like a lot, (especially to those of us who are admitted addicts…) but a new study indicates that doing so nearly doubles your risk of getting pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest of all malignancies.
This shocking statistic about soda comes from a study at the University of Minnesota. Researchers analyzed medical records and diet histories of 60,524 Asian adults over a 14-year period; the records came from the Singapore Chinese Health Study, the Singapore Cancer Registry and the Singapore Registry of Births and Deaths. They compared consumption of soft drinks in one group and fruit juice in another group and found that the incidence of pancreatic cancer was 87% higher among those who drank soda.
The researchers established that this link was independent of other risk factors, such as smoking, body weight, type 2 (adult-onset) diabetes, caloric intake and the consumption of red meat. Having established that lifestyles in Singapore are very similar to those in the US, lead study author Noel Mueller, MPH, research associate at the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, DC, assured me there’s nothing uniquely dangerous about soda in Singapore; it’s the same stuff people drink here. Acknowledging that there are some genetic differences between the populations, he said those differences are not as significant as the likelihood that soda drinkers don’t practice as healthy of eating habits as do the fruit juice drinkers.
Not So Sweet
Researchers hypothesize that sugar is the culprit–all diet soda drinkers, breathe a collective sigh now-whew. A typical can of soda contains 12.5 teaspoons of sugar (usually in the form of high-fructose corn syrup.) That’s enough to trigger a surge in the pancreatic production of insulin. Dr. Mueller theorizes that this habitual “blasting” of the pancreas with so much sugar may stimulate cancerous tumor growth over time. Though fruit juice is also high in sugar, researchers think that the nutrients and fiber in juices may buffer any unhealthy impact.
The resulting advice to limit sugar intake is predictable, of course, but I’m guessing that even those of us who already do that have vastly underestimated the potential damage that even a few sodas a week can do. This is no time for sweet talk: Stay away from sugary soda.
Source(s):
Noel T. Mueller, MPH, research associate, Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, DC.
Reprinted with the permission of:
Bottom Line Publications/Daily Health News
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